So I got a Mac about a month ago. I downloaded Unity and Visual Studio for Mac. Then, I started working, and VS for Mac is just terrible. The first thing I see is that there is no option to download optional modules, like C++, if I want it. It just comes out of the box with Unity. Great, right? Yeah, that’s great for Unity developers, but if I happen to want to code in C++ or Python, or anything else, I gotta get a new IDE instead of VS for Mac.
Okay, that doesn’t matter for you Unity devs. So let’s see, I open it up, and it’s slow at opening up. Yeah, Visual Studio is a big program, so it takes time to open up. Well, it takes almost double the time to open something up, than on Windows. I code a bit, and then it crashes. It’s crashed a couple of times now. Is it because I have an M1 chip? Now, I just want to switch to another IDE. It’s just simply not good for Mac. It doesn’t even have great Git integration. With Windows, just a quick look at the bottom of the screen, and then I see the branch I’m in, the uncommitted changes, and an option to commit straight from VS. With Mac it’s not good. They just have many complex tabs at the bottom saying, “Blame, Changes”, and no option to commit. Does anyone know another IDE that I could switch to, that also has good integration with Unity? Thanks for hearing me rant.
VS for Mac is absolute trash. It’s just Xamarin, which was pretty much always clowned on for being an absolutely trash IDE. At this point, I’d say that Visual Studio Code, with GitHub Integration and actual working Unity support, is your best bet.
Yeah, I was thinking for going for that too. Probably making VS for Mac bad is just another sneaky Microsoft trick for getting people to buy Windows.
You gonna love it 
$139.00 per year for an IDE?
It seems like a lot but it’s definitely one of those pieces of software where it can EASILY justify the cost. If you’re open to a paid option, it is worth at least checking out the trial.
Is that much for the amazing tool you gonna use every single day? The only tool the programmer needs to pay for?
It’s the only one that comes with Unity-specific features out of the box.
It’s worth every penny.
Yeah, I’ll check out the trial and see how I like it. The only problem is that it’s per year.
Actually, they have something in regards to that that I find to be pretty reasonable: a perpetual fallback license
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license-
I run windows but I can vouch for VSC in general. I had to migrate from VS to VSC simply because VS eventually became too slow to be usable. No major problems with VSC so far, but it does work differently in many regards to VS. The biggest annoyances so far are these:
- When subscribing to an event, you can’t just type “+=” and press TAB to generate code, you actually have to type the function name. (The actual function can be generated with ctrl+. (dot) shortcut though).
- Only symbols visible to the current namespace and imports are available in intellisense (in VS 2019 it automatically uses the correct namespaces if missing.)
- Debugging is iffy. When enabling it, it’s not guaranteed to work. It might just freeze everything in Unity (even when not running anything) and you have to disable it and enable it again before working. You also have to do a first time set up of debugging before it works, but it’s fairly straight forward.
- The latest unity plugin (3.0.2) on marketplace doesn’t work. You need to downgrade to 2.7.5.
- If adding a breakpoint during a break, the code will continue to run automatically and it won’t break on any of the breakpoints until next loop. Luckily, stepping seems to work though.
- No quick stepping (in VS 2019 you could just go to line with cursor and press icon to go there).
Other than that, my experience has been good. It’s truly bliss clicking a program icon/file name and it actually opens in a way that feels responsive. (VS was so bad I actually became reluctant to create new code files in Unity and opening them since that would freeze everything for half a minute.)
Some other things to point out in general with VSC:
- ctrl+p to search project to open file (rather than ctrl+,).
- ctrl+t to search for symbols.
- ctrl+shift+p to run a command (VERY useful, once you learn commands it’s so much faster to work with than UI).
- ctrl+. to generate code for different scenarios.
- F2 to rename symbol (not ctrl+r+r).
I use Rider, for every project irrelevant of engine… Agreed, worth it.
Where are you seeing that? The prices I’m seeing are far higher…
Edit: Oh, I see. For “individual use” that’s the price. Fingers crossed that doesn’t come with a limited license.
Edit 2: It’s basically a floating license vs. a user specific license. Both allow commercial use, but businesses are specifically not allowed to purchase individual licenses, they have to buy the floating organisation license. The pricing isn’t bad either way if it’ll increase productivity.
No. VS for Mac (aka Mono Develop) was bad before they acquired Xamarin. It might have had a chance had they invested resources into developing it but they decided to instead start from scratch with Visual Studio Code and the result is a much more solid code editor.
I am really amused developer is concerned about the miniscule cost of IDE he will make money off from.
Quite strange is that the pricing from the other products (such as IntelliJ or WebStorm) show a higher “All products price”
$649 instead of $249. From the Rider page it seems to be the cheapest.
To the OP, just adding another vouch for Rider. I use many of the Jetbrains products daily for the past 10 years and they are amazing. IntelliJ (Java) is my favorite IDE and when they came out with Rider it was a huge improvement from VS and I switched over immediately.
Also have a look at Script Inspector 3 on the asset store. Runs inside Unity. Currently $18
It depends on your region.
$139 is a decent price for a perpetual license. But that one’s a subscription.
For comparison, VS Code is free, blender is free, aseprite is cheap+perpetual, clip studio can be acquired for $50 (and $220 if you’re hungry for that book editing feature), LMMS is free and so on.
So with all that in mind VSCode is probably the best option.
Do you mainly use VSCode? I use it from time to time but have never gotten to “enjoy” it. I mostly just use it when I want to use Azure plugins that aren’t on other IDEs.
Tried installing a bunch of plugins but found that the intelliSense and other similar tools aren’t really as good as in Rider/IntelliJ or even (Visual Studio + ReSharper).
Maybe there are some plugins I am missing… but I find the features from ReSharper mainly the hardest to replicate in VS Code.
For unity? Yes, I’m primarily using VS Code. It is fairly fast and starts up quickly. I don’t have any real reason to switch to anything else, to be honest. (Especially at $135/year pricetag).
I’ve also briefly tried it for C++/CMake, but the integration is iffier (have to click a button on taskbar and can’t start debugging through F5 like usual unless you start it in a specific environment) and I haven’t played with that much. I also used it for python, because integrating autocompletion for blender types (bpy and so on) for some reason is easier to do with VS Code than it is with PyCharm.